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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: instances of a Diotima or an Aspasia), seeing that, even as to personal
beauty, her place was taken by young mankind instead of womankind, he tries
to work out the problem of love without regard to the distinctions of
nature. And full of the evils which he recognized as flowing from the
spurious form of love, he proceeds with a deep meaning, though partly in
joke, to show that the 'non-lover's' love is better than the 'lover's.'
We may raise the same question in another form: Is marriage preferable
with or without love? 'Among ourselves,' as we may say, a little parodying
the words of Pausanias in the Symposium, 'there would be one answer to this
question: the practice and feeling of some foreign countries appears to be
more doubtful.' Suppose a modern Socrates, in defiance of the received
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